Theater artist works as ritualist in new venture

Laurie Dietrich conceived and appeared in “Hetaerae,” a ritual-driven multidisciplinary piece that premiered at the Sterling Houston Theater at Jump-Start.

Laurie Dietrich conceived and appeared in “Hetaerae,” a ritual-driven multidisciplinary piece that premiered at the Sterling Houston Theater at Jump-Start.

Photo: Courtesy Annette Landry

Photo: Courtesy Annette Landry

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Laurie Dietrich conceived and appeared in “Hetaerae,” a ritual-driven multidisciplinary piece that premiered at the Sterling Houston Theater at Jump-Start.

Laurie Dietrich conceived and appeared in “Hetaerae,” a ritual-driven multidisciplinary piece that premiered at the Sterling Houston Theater at Jump-Start.

Photo: Courtesy Annette Landry

Theater artist works as ritualist in new venture

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The first time Laurie Dietrich took part in an ecstatic ritual, she was struck by the theatricality of it.

“I thought, 'This is like kick-ass theater,'” she said. “For the most part, it's some of the best theater I have seen or been part of.”

The rituals have a spiritual, though nondenominational, bent. They blend music, movement, chanting and exploration of myth, among other elements. Participants use them to deal with their fears and raise big questions about their lives in hopes of improving themselves and for professional development.

Dietrich has worked as a ritualist for years. She recently co-founded a group, Expanding Inward, to offer those services. The group launched its website, expanding inward.com, last week. And they've already gotten a few bookings.

The group is a spinoff, of sorts, of Diana's Grove and Mystery School, a haven for self-discovery outside of St. Louis where Dietrich studied and facilitated rituals. When the Grove shuttered late last year, she and four other program directors there decided to start their own venture. Expanding Inward is the result of that.

Dietrich divides much of her time these days between her work as a ritualist, which takes her mostly to the Midwest, and her work for the stage. She's a prolific actress, director and playwright. Among other things, she co-founded and ran the now-defunct Shoestring Shakespeare Company and is a member of Jump-Start Performance Co. Her most recent project was as dramaturge and Gertrude in “Method & Madness: Hamlet 2013,” a collaboration between Jump-Start and Classic Theatre.

That work is scripted. The ritual work, though it spins from established myth, can't be worked out in advance.

They take place in safe spaces where people feel free to open themselves up and get down to the hard work of personal improvement.

“Our rituals are like rehearsal,” Dietrich said. “They're an opportunity to practice behaviors or skills you don't feel you have yet and try to cultivate those you want, or finding and claiming some piece of ourselves that we've lost. We talk a lot about opening to your wisdom.”

In one of the most powerful rituals she has ever witnessed, she said, all of the participants wrote down something that was shameful to them and dropped the slips of paper into a bowl. Then everyone in the group drew someone else's note and read it out loud.

“To hear someone else speaking this and finding acceptance, and perhaps hearing that others had the same secret, was a powerful thing,” she said. “It's life-changing.”

The rituals are rooted in re-workings of ancient myths, which is what drew her to Diana's Grove. Her then-husband had introduced her to Joseph Campbell's writings, and she was so taken with his ideas that she started looking for other ways to engage with myth.

“At the Grove, what I found was this amazing, psychologically rooted spirituality that spoke to me,” she said.

The use of myth is a key element to the work that was done there and the work of Expanding Inward.

“The stories we tell ourselves define our reality; they give shape to everything we do,” she said. “Nothing is as powerful as the stories we tell. And myths are the most powerful of all.”

She went to Diana's Grove for a long time as a participant before being asked to become part of the leadership team. The big question whenever that invitation was extended, she said, was, “Are you ready to put the group's experience ahead of your own?”

“I said, 'I am so ready. I so want it to be about someone else's experience,'” she said.

Dietrich had found a lot of meaning in the rituals. But she also had a hard time getting completely lost in them. A part of her longed to help shape those rituals for others. The first time that she did, and she saw many participants had been brought to tears by the profundity of the experience, she was hooked.

“I don't know how I was wired when I came into the world, but for me, that's the magic experience,” she said.

Jason Frey, a Chicago-based corporate trainer, is part of Expanding Inward. At Diana's Grove, he said, Dietrich distinguished herself with her intensity and willingness to deal with difficult subjects head-on.

“When there's a question about, 'Gosh, who's going to challenge the group with this really poignant and challenging and hard question to answer,' our eyes tend to do go to Laurie's direction because her presence is kind of amazing,” Frey said.

“It's not 'Look at me, look at me'; it's 'Listen to me because I've got something to say.' I'm confident that comes from her background in theater, but it's been my experience that it's just intrinsically who she is. And, some day, I swear to whatever, there will be a ritual or an event where Laurie will do nothing but happy, sunshiny things. And it will be really weird for all of us.”

Recently, Expanding Inward offered a ritual workshop in Kansas City, Mo., built around Persephone, who was abducted and taken to the underworld.

Robin Murphy, who had studied at Diana's Grove, brought the group in. She's long been impressed by the way that Dietrich approaches her work as a ritualist.

“She's the kind of person that you feel, 'This is somebody I can learn with and from,' because she's not interested in holding power over anybody ever,” Murphy said. “But she is very eager to share power and is very supportive in letting people have their own process. It's obvious that she is an eager learner and is engaged with the process.”

Dietrich's theater chops also bring a lot to the table, she said: “A good ritualist, in my mind, has a sense of theatricality.”

Dietrich is looking for ways to bring some aspects of her work as a ritualist to her theater work.

“What I want to do is continue to blend the two pieces,” she said.

In terms of tone, her stage work may not slide neatly into the “ritual theater” category for some, said S.T. Shimi, artistic director at Jump-Start, who has worked with Dietrich on several projects.

“I think of her approach as being dark and spiky and unsentimental, which are not words that people normally associate with ritual,” Shimi said. “She taps into that darkness, that other kind of way of looking at life, that's unsentimental but not hopeless.”

They worked together on “Hetaerae,” an often mesmerizing piece that Dietrich conceived, co-wrote and appeared in. It premiered at the Sterling Houston Theater at Jump-Start in April. The piece explores female sexuality through the ages, digging into how it came uncoupled from the sacred.

It was built collaboratively, much like the rituals that Dietrich helps create. All of the actresses taking part had a hand in the writing and in discussions about overall approach.

“We talked a lot about intention, about the space that we wanted to leave the audience in,” Shimi said. “There was a lot of talk about transformation. A lot of ritual is about creating a space, setting your intention and working with transformation, so we talked a lot about how that could work with this piece.”

“Hetaerae” dealt in myth, as well, including a segment based on the story of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who is asked to give up parts of herself as she makes her way through the underworld. Shimi played the role, dropping pieces of clothing that represented various aspects of Inanna's life — her work, her family, her identity — as she moved through the piece.

Dietrich is still working on “Hetaerae,” which she'd like to find a way to tour. And she'd like to make the Inanna sequence interactive by inviting the audience to take part in the ritual.